I
Billy Meersam, an old sailor friend in Frisco, told me this story as I was sitting one day on Rafferty’s wharf, contemplating the green water, and smoking. Billy chewed and spat between paragraphs. We were discussing Captain Pat Ginnell and his ways; and Billy, who had served his time on hard ships, and, as a young man, on the Three Brothers, that tragedy of the sea which now lies a coal hulk in Gibraltar harbour, had quite a lot to say on hazing captains in general and Captain Pat Ginnell in particular.
“I had one trip with him,” said Billy, “shark catchin’ down the coast in that old dough dish of his, the Heart of Ireland. Treated me crool bad, he did; crool bad he treated me from first to last; his beef was as hard as his fist, and bud barley he served out for coffee. He was known all along the shore side, but he got his gruel at last, and got it good. Now, by any chance did you ever hear of a Captain Mike Blood and his mate, Billy Harman? Knew the parties, did you? Well, now, I’ll tell you. Blood it were put the hood on Ginnell. Ginnell laid out to get the better of Blood, and Blood, he got the better of Ginnell. He and Harman signed on for a cruise in the Heart of Ireland; then they rose on Ginnell, and took the ship and made him deck hand. They did that. They made a line for a wreck they knew of on a rock be name of San Juan, off the San Lucas Islands, and the three of them were peeling that wreck, and they were just gettin’ twenty thousand dollars in gold coin off her, when the party who’d bought the wreck, and his name was Gunderman, lit down on them and collared the boodle and kicked them back into their schooner, givin’ them the choice of makin’ an offing or takin’ a free voyage back to Frisco, with a front seat in the penitentiary thrown in.
“It was a crool setback for them, the dollars hot in their hands one minit and took away the next, you may say, but they didn’t quarrel over it; they set out on a new lay, and this is what happened with Cap’ Ginnell.”
But, with Mr. Meersam’s leave, I will take the story from his mouth and tell it in my own way, with additions gathered from the chief protagonists and from other sources.
When the three adventurers, dismissed with a caution by Gunderman, got sail on the Heart of Ireland, they steered a sou’westerly course, till San Juan was a speck to northward and the San Lucas Islands were riding high on the sea on the port quarter.
Then Blood hove the schooner to for a council of war, and Ginnell, though reduced again to deck hand, was called into it.
“Well,” said Blood, “that’s over and done with, and there’s no use calling names. Question is what we’re to do now. We’ve missed twenty thousand dollars through fooling and delaying, and we’ve got to make good somehow, even on something small. If I had ten cents in my pocket, Pat Ginnell, I’d leave you and your old shark boat for the nearest point of land and hoof it back to Frisco; but I haven’t—worse luck.”
“There’s no use in carryin’ on like that,” said Harman. “Frisco’s no use to you or me, and your boots would be pretty well wore out before you got there. What I say is this: We’ve got a schooner that’s rigged out for shark fishin’. Well, let’s go on that lay; we’ll give Ginnell a third share, and he’ll share with us in payin’ the coolies. Shark oil’s fetchin’ big prices now in Frisco. It’s not twenty thousand dollars, but it’s somethin’.”
Ginnell, leaning against the after rail and cutting himself a fill of tobacco, laughed in a mirthless way. Then he spoke: “Shark fishin’, begob; well, there’s a word to be said be me on that. You two thought yourselves mighty clever, collarin’ me boat and makin’ yourselves masthers of it. I don’t say you didn’t thrump me ace, I don’t say you didn’t work it so that I can’t have the law on you, but I’ll say this, Misther Harman, if you want to go shark fishin’, you can work the business yourself, and a nice hand you’ll make of it. Why, you don’t know the grounds, let alone the work. A third share, and me the rightful owner of this tub! I’ll see you ham-strung before I put a hand to it.”
“Then get forrard,” said Harman. “Don’t know the grounds? Maybe I don’t know the grounds you used to work farther north, but I know every foot of the grounds here-a-way, right from the big kelp beds to the coast. Why, I been on the fish-commission ship and worked with ’em all through this part, takin’ soundin’s and specimens—rock, weed, an’ fish. Know the bottom here as well as I know the pa’m of me hand.”
“Well, if you know it so well, you’ve no need of me. Lay her on the grounds yourself,” said Ginnell.
He went forward.
“Black sullen,” said Harman, looking after him. “He ain’t no use to lead or drive. Well, let’s get her before the wind an’ crowd down closer to Santa Catalina. I’m not sayin’ this is a good shark ground, the sea’s too much of a blame’ fish circus just here—but it’s better than nothin’.”
They got the Heart before the wind, which had died down to a three-knot breeze, Blood steering and Harman forward, on the lookout.
Harman was right, the sea round these coasts is a fish circus, to give it no better name.
The San Lucas Islands and Santa Catalina seem the rendezvous of most of the big fish inhabiting the Pacific. Beginning with San Miguel, the islands run almost parallel to the California coast in a sou’westerly direction, and, seen now from the schooner’s deck, they might have been likened to vast ships under press of sail, so tall were they above the sea shimmer and so white in the sunshine their fog-filled cañons.
Away south, miles and miles away across the blue water, the peaks of Santa Catalina Island showed a dream of vague rose and gold.
It was for Santa Catalina that Harman was making now.
To tell the whole truth, bravely as he had talked of his knowledge of these waters, he was not at all sure in his mind as to their shark-bearing capacity. He did not know that for a boat whose business was shark-liver oil, this bit of sea was not the happiest hunting ground.
Nothing is more mysterious than the way fish make streets in the sea and keep to them; make cities, so to say, and inhabit them at certain seasons; make playgrounds, and play in them.
Off the north of Santa Catalina Island you will find Yellow Fin. Cruise down on the seaward side and you will find a spot where the Yellow Fin vanish and the Yellow Tail take their place; farther south you strike the street of the White Sea Bass, which opens on to Halibut Square, which, in turn, gives upon a vast area, where the Black Sea Bass, the Swordfish, the Albacore, and the Whitefish are at home.
Steer round the south of the island and you hit the suburbs of the great fish city of the Santa Catalina Channel. The Grouper Banks are its purlieus, and the Sunfish keeps guard of its southern gate. You pass Barracuda Street and Bonito Street, till the roar of the Sea Lions from their rocks tells you that you are approaching the Washington Square of undersea things—the great Tuna grounds.
Skirting the Tuna grounds, and right down the Santa Catalina Channel, runs a Broadway which is also a Wall Street, where much business is done in the way of locomotion and destruction. Here are the Killer Whales and the Sulphur-bottom Whales and the Grey Whales, and the Porpoises, Dolphins, Skipjacks, and Sand Dabs.
Sharks you will find nearly everywhere, but, and this was a fact unknown to Harman, the sharks, as compared to the other big fish, are few and far between.
It was getting toward sundown, when the schooner, under a freshening wind, came along the seaward side of Santa Catalina Island. The island on this side shows two large bays, separated by a rounded promontory. In the northernmost of these bays they dropped anchor close in shore, in fifteen-fathom water.